Full Body Listening: Reflections on Life, Healing and the Ecozoic
"Being Love Now"
Monday July 4, 2011
It’s happened again. Visiting an opening at the Eno Gallery in Hillsborough, with artwork by Nancy Tuttle May, opened the doorway for my hopscotch-style inner musings.
As I stood before each of her bold abstracts, suggestive of intimacy in landscapes, I wondered how her artwork, with myriad layers of color and shape, and minimal details, created such a pleasurable sense of wholeness. I’m sure there’s a technical answer, but my mind didn’t land on that square.
Driving home, an inner bell resonated with my real question: how do ” I” experience wholeness? My husband, always game for my queries, said that for him, it was a sense of belonging.
. . . Mmmm , I mused. Seems right.
Still curious about how others experience wholeness, I delved into a couple of recently purchased books. One from Ram Das, Being Love Now, described it in metaphors: succumbing to the softness of the ultimate romance with the Divine, being submerged in a tidal wave of love, or being pulled into the gravitational field of a star.
. . . Aha, sensing the Divine through direct awareness as wholeness.
I have recently reacquainted myself with Ram Das, who, forty years after publication of his iconic book, Be Here Now, shares the essence of his lifetime on a spiritual journey from his home by internet. He makes it simple. By skype from Maui, he said that being present , is to realize that we, as souls, are “loving awareness”, and then, to love everything we can be aware of. As he spoke he pointed from his head (identification with roles in life) to his heart (identification with soul).
It wasn’t just his words that held me, it was the expression in his eyes, and a palpable feeling, similar to the one I had standing before the paintings, that something here was whole.
. . . .I play the hopscotch game of my mind here. . . and skip to a different square.
The other book offers scientific and philosophical updates to the understanding of our place among the stars and galaxies by Nancy Ellen Abrams, a cultural philosopher, and Joel R. Primack, an astrophysicist. The New Universe and the Human Future discusses what new discoveries in science bring to this timeless fascination we have to make meaning through our cosmologies.
. . . Are they’re talking about . . . on a really big societal scale. . . how the human community approaches wholeness?
Abrams and Primack explain that after a four-century rupture between science and the questions of meaning and value, science is trending towards a reunion. Their book, originating from a series of lectures at Yale University, includes gorgeous pictures of galaxies and intriguing theories that size and scale respond to varying laws of physics, some of which are not known.
Thomas Berry, father of Ecozoic thought, once told me, the wisdom of science alone will never suffice to create wholeness . . . that science is an important and expanding window, but that it cannot ultimately stand alone as a singular meaning-making vehicle through which we perceive our place in the cosmos.
. . . . its back to you and me. . to use our senses. . to anchor our souls in that feeling of wholeness. . .to discover what makes meaning and value. . . to be informed or inspired with some help from travelers, like Ram Das, Nancy Tuttle May, Thomas Berry or Abrams and Primack.
. . . how do you experience wholeness?